Green card sponsorship by patent law firms

[alyosha99]

I'm currently a non-resident alien and applying to law schools. I'm interested in a career in patent law, but I'm worried that I'll have great difficulty finding a job because technically only green card holders (or citizens) can practice.

[Pinochet]

If you are hired under a valid employment visa, you can still obtain "limited recognition" to practice on tasks assigned by your employer.  Firms hire H-1B employees to work on patent drafting and prosecution all the time, and may or may not sponsor them for green cards.  (You don't even have to have limited recognition to draft patents;  a firm could hire you to work on applications even if you have no credentials.  The firm's partners would be the ones on the hook for their employees' work quality.)

You should consider carefully whether you want to shell out the tuition for a U.S. law school, because your employment prospects are even less certain than a citizen's (which are already iffy) and because you may not be able to take out student loans due to your immigration status.  (The banks learned in 2008, if they hadn't figured it out already, that foreigners could simply leave the country and abandon their heavily mortgaged 125% LTV  houses.  Student loans don't even leave a house behind to foreclose upon.)  If you get into a T14 your future employment prospects are obviously going to be much better than those of someone who goes to a fog-the-mirror school.

There's also the issue of what your undergraduate degree is, and whether you would be allowed to take the patent bar if your degree is from a foreign school.  If you went to, say, TU Delft for an EE degree, your degree would probably be readily accepted (but the documentation requirements will require a lot of extra effort -- translations of course descriptions and so on).  If your degree is for a field that is not clearly engineering or science, or if your undergraduate school's standards are low, your degree might not be accepted as equivalent.